The U.S. Senate voted 56 to 39 Tuesday to continue to allow congressional earmarking, the practice that lets individual lawmakers designate federal funds for specific projects, usually in their home states. Although Senate Republicans recently adopted a nonbinding resolution to prevent GOP senators from requesting or supporting earmarks, the bill proposed Tuesday — by two [...]
In a show of resolve, a baker’s dozen of Democratic senators, led by Joseph I. Lieberman, the Connecticut independent who is a senior member of the Armed Services Committee, held a news conference to proclaim that they had secured the votes to authorize repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding gay soldiers.
But the senators said that the crucial support of Republicans would hinge on whether Senate leaders allow a relatively free-flowing debate on the military policy bill that includes the language authorizing repeal of the ban on gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military – and they urged the majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, to do so.
Mr. Reid said on Wednesday that he would bring the bill to the floor, including the repeal provisions, in a direct challenge to Senator John McCain of Arizona, the senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee, who has indicated that he will try to block the measure. Mr. McCain similarly led colleagues in stopping the bill in September.
Some of those Republican colleagues, however, have said that they favor repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and that their previous opposition was based on Mr. Reid’s limiting both the amount of time for debate and the number of amendments that they could offer.
But it is unclear if Mr. Reid will be able to meet their demands, given the extremely tight Congressional calendar between now and the end of the year, or that the Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, is willing to make any agreement on the length of debate or number of amendments that could be offered to the measure.
“The movement to end the injustice of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ is alive and well, and we are going to keep fighting – in the spirit of the American military – until we get the job done,” Mr. Lieberman said. “And we will get the job done.”
Mr. Lieberman added, “One of the things we are doing today is to appeal to Senator Reid and Senator McConnell to negotiate a fair and open amendment process on the Department of Defense authorization bill to allow it to come up.”
Mr. Lieberman conceded, however, that he had made no progress in convincing Mr. McCain, a close friend of his, to withdraw his opposition, meaning that to surmount a filibuster, 60 senators must vote to cut off debate on a motion to proceed.
“I am confident that we have more than 60 votes prepared to take up the defense authorization bill with the repeal of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ if only there will be a guarantee of a fair and open amendment process,” Mr. Lieberman said.
Time, however, is running out. The House has already approved its version of the military policy bill, including the repeal language, which would have to be reconciled with the Senate measure, if and when it is approved.
Leaders of the new House Republican majority, who take over at the start of the next Congress in January, have indicated that repeal of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ is not a priority for them, making it unlikely they would approve the bill again. That means if the repeal language is not approved by the end of this year, it is effectively dead.
Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, said he would be willing to work through Christmas Eve to get the legislation done, prompting Mr. Lieberman, who is Jewish, to say he would work through the eighth night of Hanukkah.
(Mr. Udall’s schedule was more realistic; the last night of Hannukah is Dec. 9, and debate on the bill may not even start before then.)
Among the 13 senators to voice support for repealing ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ was Al Franken of Minnesota, who recalled visits to military bases in his previous career as a comedian and the jokes he made ridiculing the policy, which he said were well received by soldiers.
The Pentagon is due to release a report by Dec. 1, including a survey of active duty military service members and their families, showing that a majority do not oppose open service by gay and lesbian soldiers.
But despite the support for repeal from Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, some senior military commanders and lawmakers want to continue ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’
Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, said that the demands for a fair amendment process were simply cover for efforts by Mr. McCain and others to block repeal of the policy.
“This is not about how many amendments are we going to do, or how long we are going to debate,” Ms. Shaheen said. “This is about those who oppose this policy wanting to kill it and taking every opportunity they can and using the Senate rules to do that. That’s exactly what is going on.”
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Christopher Miller for The New York Times Gail Fenumiai, right, director of the Alaska Department of Elections, examined a write-in ballot for Senator Lisa Murkowski with Sarah Felix, assistant attorney general of Alaska, in Juneau on Wednesday.
7:39 p.m. | Updated JUNEAU, Alaska – “Liza Makowski?”
“Challenge.”
So said Terry Campo, an observer working on behalf of Joe Miller, the Republican Senate candidate, as he hovered over a table where two election workers on Wednesday helped sift through more than 230,000 ballots cast in the Alaska Senate race. The question looming over the warehouse in this remote state capital: will Senator Lisa Murkowski become the first write-in candidate elected to the Senate since 1954?
Write-in votes have a clear lead over Mr. Miller, but the process of actually seeing whose name is on them did not begin until Wednesday. The count is expected to last until at least Friday – but a court fight could last much longer.
Christopher Miller for The New York Times A challenged write-in ballot in Juneau, Alaska.State election officials have said legal precedent allows them to accept variations in the spelling of Ms. Murkowski’s name as long as they can determine “voter intent.” They have not specified what variations they will accept, though on Wednesday election officials said they were essentially going by phonetics. The Miller campaign has filed a federal lawsuit arguing that state law requires write-in votes to be spelled correctly. On Wednesday, a federal judge court denied the campaign’s request to stop the count but the broader challenge remains.
A long fight still seemed possible after the first fraction of write-in ballots were tabulated on Wednesday. With 7 percent of precincts counted, state election officials had determined that Ms. Murkowski had won roughly 98 percent of the vote. But about 9 percent of those were under challenge by the Miller campaign, many on questions of spelling. If the Miller campaign continues challenging ballots at that rate, it could try to argue in court that discounting the challenged ballots would make him the winner.
While the prospects of that argument are unclear, the lawsuit looms and the count goes on.
“We’re proceeding,” said Gail Fenumiai, the state elections director.
For all the tension, there was also good humor.
Mr. Campo, a Washington lawyer flown out by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, confessed to having a complicated perspective.
“They called Friday night and I didn’t ask who they were sending me out for,” Mr. Campo, a veteran election lawyer in Republican races, said as he scanned ballots that passed before him. “You usually don’t have to deal with Republican versus Republican.”
But he said he met Mr. Miller on Tuesday night and was impressed. By Wednesday morning he was on the job.
“Lisa Murkoski?” Challenge. “Lisa Murckoski?” Challenge.
There were votes for Snoopy, too. And at least one for Sarah Palin, though for the House, not the Senate.
“Murkowski, Lisa?” There were lots of those – and lots of challenges.
Then something changed. A signal went out from lawyers for Mr. Miller: stop challenging that one. Candidates whose names are actually on the ballot are listed last name first, as in Miller, Joe.
“I’m going to go ahead and tell everybody to back off that, O.K.?” an observer for Mr. Miller asked one of the lawyers working for his campaign, John J. Tiemessen.
Mr. Tiemessen explained later, “We had a miscommunication on that.”
Mr. Campo got the message. When Ms. Fenumiai came to the table to pass judgment on the challenged ballots – she worked her way from table to table during the day, accompanied by state lawyers – Mr. Campo waved away the ballots he had initially challenged because they had the names reversed. Back into the pile for Ms. Murkowski they went.
In the initial count on Election Day, ballot scanners only registered whether a voter had filled in the oval beside a candidate’s name – or beside the write-in category.
After Election Day, write-in votes led by about 13,400 votes, a difference of almost 7 percentage points. The margin narrowed on Tuesday, after a large batch of absentee and other ballots were counted. The write-in category now leads Mr. Miller by about 11,400 votes, about 5 percentage points.
Ms. Murkowski has been favored to win after the write-in ballots are counted. Barring a landslide for Mr. Miller in absentee and questioned ballots that are still to be counted, he could potentially need more than 10 percent of the write-in votes to have either been cast for someone other than Ms. Murkowski or to have been cast for her improperly.
Mr. Tiemessen said observers for Mr. Miller have been challenging ballots at a rate of about 7 to 12 percent, depending on the precinct.
“We’ve seen Nurkowski, we’ve seen Frank and Nancy Murkwoski, Lisa’s parents,” he said. “We’ve seen every possible permutation and even ones we didn’t know were possible. Basically, if you take Lisa Murkowski’s name and make an anagram out of it, we’ve seen it.”
Mr. Campo, at the counting table, said otherwise.
“I’m impressed with how many people spelled it right and how good their handwriting is,” he said.
The Murkowski campaign largely expressed confidence and satisfaction with the process and said the vast majority of ballots challenged by the Miller campaign were for minor spelling or legibility issues they believed would not ultimately cause them to be discounted. They said many of the ballots challenged by observers for Mr. Miller were determined to be valid by Ms. Fenumiai, including those with the first and last name reversed.
But even they seemed unsure of the exact standard Ms. Fenumiai was applying in terms of spelling.
“It appears to me that there’s about a three-letter standard,” said John Tracy, a spokesman for the Murkowski campaign, assessing how inaccurate a spelling might be before the ballot is discounted.
But he largely praised Ms. Fenumiai. He noted that she had allowed a ballot that placed a “y” on the end of the candidate’s last name but disallowed one that started her last name with an “N.”
“She playing it very safe,” he said.
Sarah Felix, the state’s assistant attorney general, who consulted with Ms. Fenumiai as she reviewed ballots throughout the day, said there were not precise parameters on what spellings or other variations she would accept.
“The director is using her discretion,” Ms. Felix said. “She’s using a common sense phonetic test.”
While state election official cite case law they say allows discretion in things like spelling, state law says write-in votes will be counted if the write-in oval is filled in and “if the name, as it appears on the write-in declaration of candidacy, of the candidate or of the last name of the candidate is written in the space provided.”
In a brief filed Tuesday, Thomas Van Flein, a lawyer for Mr. Miller, wrote that “write-in ballots with misspellings are statutorily invalid, and election officials lack the authority to decide nevertheless to count them.”
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This is the perfect time for the Republican Party to make good on its claim that it wants to recapture the loyalty of African-American voters. Yes — recapture all those lost Lincoln Republicans put off and run off by the 1960′s and 1970′s antics of the architects and beneficiaries of the Southern strategy. In the [...]
The counting of write-in ballots continues in Alaska, after a federal judge denied Senate candidate Joe Miller’s request to disqualify any apparent votes for Sen. Lisa Murkowski that misspelled her name. U.S. District Court Judge Ralph Beistline said Wednesday that Miller didn’t prove he would suffer “irreparable harm” if the count went on, The Associated [...]
When your last name is Murkowski, you probably get used to having it misspelled from time to time. But with the count of write-in ballots under way in the Alaska Senate race, Republican Joe Miller has sued in federal court to disqualify any apparent votes for Sen. Lisa Murkowski that misspell her name. Miler doesn’t [...]
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